Footprints of the Red Men: Indian Geographical Names — Passage 54
[Edward Manning Ruttenber (1906)] Verdrietig Hoek, or "Tedious Point," of Dutch notation, where, after several forms it culminates in _Navish._ Lindstrom's _Naratic-on,_ on the lower Delaware, was probably Cape May, and an equivalent substantially of the New England _Nayantukq-ut,_ "A point on a tidal river," and Raritan was the point of the peninsula which the clan occupied terminating on Raritan Bay, where, probably, the name was first met by Dutch navigators. The dialectic exchange of N and R, and of the surd mutes _k_ and _t_ are clear in comparing _Nanakan_ on the Hudson, _Naratic-on_ on the Delaware, and _Raritan_ on the Raritan. Van der Donck's map locates the clan bearing the name in four villages at and above the junction of a branch of the stream at New Brunswick, N. J., where there is a certain point as well as on Raritan Bay. The clan was conspicuous in the early days of Dutch New Netherland. Van Tienhoven wrote that it had been compelled to remove further inland on account of freshets, but mainly from its inability to resist the raids of the southern Indians; that the lands which they left unoccupied was between "two high mountains far distant from one to the other;" that it was "the handsomest and pleasantest country that man can behold." The great southern trunk-line Indian path led through this valley, and was then, as it is now, the great route of travel between the northern and the southern coast.